


the water won't have ya if the devil's too blind

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Attempted Suicide and subsequent discussions about it, F/M, I’d call this fic more bleak than dark if that helps contextualize the previous two tags, Metaphors for sexual assault (via Daemon touching), but hope is like the sun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-08-20 06:10:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20223109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: That water’s too dirty to wash away your sins.“They’re not sins.  I didn’t commit them against god.  There is no such thing as god.”Then whatever you want to call them.  Crimes don’t get washed away by a river.“It’s a cursed river,” Ben points out.No, it’s a polluted river.  Curses aren’t real. Not like that, anyway.“Are you really well-actually-ing me?”Yes, I am.  Because you’re an idiot.  Some extremely oily and not remotely potable water is not going to be able to remove the guilt you feel about killing your father, turning your back on your mother, murdering hundreds of innocents, and helping the First Order destroy the world.  Especially when you knew I wasn’t going to let you die.--In which Ben Solo washes up on shore, very still alive and unsure of what to do next until a passing scavenger offers him a lift on her boat.  Who is he now?  Who does he want to be?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [La_Catrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/La_Catrina/gifts).

> For Lexi, who did not know that Brown Bird was the Mood Music of 2014 for me with this prompt. Prompt (and title) come from [Down to the River](https://open.spotify.com/track/5Y4KPoGudwsnrNWtWXrcSi?si=n9aiQNISSCyU9wQsWNVy4w)
> 
> You also asked for a _His Dark Materials_ AU, so I figured I’d throw in some daemons because why not. Though I will confess to...not having read the series in a while so the communication mechanic might not be true to the original.
> 
> Now that anon is off and I don't have to worry about Rooby Doo finding me (which she did anyway, mad props), thank you to Jeeno for beta-reading this and pushing me on it!

_ _

_ So I went down to the river of insufferable sins _ __   
_ Lord I tried but the water wouldn’t let me come in _ __   
_ Too many lives have been broken _ __   
_ There’s too much blood on my hands _ _   
_ __ _There ain’t no water in this world could turn me back into an innocent man_

Ben wakes lying face-down in the mud, his hair and skin and clothes oily.

He looks at his hands. 

They are covered in blood.

When he laughs, it is humorless. When he laughs, he coughs up a little bit of bile, sputters it out until he is sitting up and staring across the river.

The other side is as barren and brown as the side he’s sitting on. The trees are twisted and leafless, the grass is so dry that it’s crackling and when the sky hits the horizon, it, too, is more brown than anything else. 

_ You satisfied?  _ Kira asks and he glances over his shoulder. She’s standing there, her brown eyes fixed on him, the cotton mask he’d made her months before tied primly around her long face.

He doesn’t reply, he just gets to his feet. He’s a bit shaky. He’d clearly been under the water for long enough that it’s affected him. He can’t decide if he hopes that the pollution will poison him or not. Then he won’t really have survived it. Then he’ll have given his life back to the world he helped destroy.

“Not really,” he sighs, resting a hand on her neck. She lets out a huff, and he can see her lips blowing back and forth beneath the cotton. He leans his face against her mane. 

_ You’re getting me dirty,  _ she complains. 

“I’ll give you a nice long brush tonight,” he replies.

_ Yes, but that won’t get the oil out. _

“Vain now, are we?”

_ We’ve always been vain about hair. And yours is a mess. I told you this wasn’t going to solve the problem. _

He runs a hand through his hair, shuddering. It’s sticky and he groans when he realizes that his fingers will probably turn his hair into grease-covered valleys and mountains. “Where’s my helmet.”

_ Where you left it,  _ Kira replies.

“Helpful,” Ben growls at her. “And how far down the river did I actually make it.” 

Kira flicks her tail.  _ Far enough.  _ Then, clearly because she’s feeling generous:  _ Hop on. _

“You sure?”

_ You promised me a good brushing later, so make it count. _

“I’m not imposing on her majesty’s--”

_ Oh shut up. _

Ben climbs up. 

He tries not to ride his daemon unless he truly has to. She is not a pack mule. Some people think he’s eccentric for it, but he has always assumed that they focus on it so as not to focus on the other things about him that should, by rights, give them pause.

He looks down at his hands. Oily, greasy, dirty. But there is no blood on them. There never is. A product of his guilty conscience whenever he wakes, and nothing he can do can wash them clean. At least, that’s what Kira thinks.

She waits a whole five minutes before starting again.

_ I still think seeing if you’d drown was excessive. _

“Yeah, well, it didn’t work, did it?”

_ That water’s too dirty to wash away your sins. _

“They’re not sins. I didn’t commit them against god. There is no such thing as god.”

_ Then whatever you want to call them. Crimes don’t get washed away by a river. _

“It’s a cursed river,” Ben points out. 

_ No, it’s a  _ polluted _ river. Curses aren’t real. Not like that, anyway. _

“Are you really well-actually-ing me?”

_ Yes, I am. Because you’re an idiot. Some extremely oily and not remotely potable water is not going to be able to remove the guilt you feel about killing your father, turning your back on your mother, murdering hundreds of innocents, and helping the First Order destroy the world. Especially when you knew I wasn’t going to let you die. _

“You would not have.” He loves her dearly, but his vain daemon would certainly not get herself covered in the grime of the river if she could avoid it. And she had, clearly, avoided it. He had not drowned. 

_ I most certainly would not have. I value my own life, thank you very much. And you value yours, even if you won’t admit it. So let’s put this little venture behind us, shall we?  _

Yes, he does value his life. Enough to have fled his uncle’s house and never come back, hang the consequences. He shudders, and pats her neck absentmindedly. “Nice to have someone worrying after me.”

He stares back out across the river.

He’s never been in this part of the world before. He’d taken eighteen days to get here because of what locals said about the river.  _ The devil only spits out those too evil to take.  _ If there’s no god, then there’s definitely no devil, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from thinking what they think about the river. 

It is a churning river, fast flowing and lots of rocks to make the water wild. It sort of glistens rainbow from the oilslick on the surface. Its own sort of beauty, he supposes. 

_ Uh-oh _ , Kira says.

“What?”

_ Your helmet’s gone. _

“My--” he sits up straighter and looks ahead. Yes, that was the treestump he’d rested it against. His bag is there too and it had been torn through, clearly someone looking for value. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” he mutters, dismounting and jogging over to the dead tree. 

They’d gotten his food, his canteen, his first aid kit, and all his credits. But most valuable of all is the helmet. It’s got air purifiers in each of the inhalation channels that’ll keep the grey, smoggy air out of your lungs and keep them from going black.

“Right,” he mutters.

Well.

“It’s not like I wanted to live anyway,” he tells Kira dryly.

_ Oh shut up and make a cloth mask,  _ she retorts hotly.  _ You’re not ready to die. You don’t want to die. You just think you deserve it after everything you’ve done. _

“I  _ do _ deserve it after everything I’ve done.”

_ Then why don’t you go into the middle of a village and tell them what you’ve done and let them put you against a wall for firing then?  _ Kira snaps.

“You’re really fucking annoying, you know that?”

_ So are you,  _ she replies, sounding far too pleased with herself. 

Ben sheds his jacket--First Order standard, black and heavy and tugs his shirt up over his head, then takes off his sweat-stained undershirt. He wrinkles his nose at it. The scent of his own sweat is tangy in his nose, but he supposes he’ll get used to it. He wraps the undershirt around his face, but knows better than to say the frustrated  _ I’d rather take the smog than my own sweat _ that creeps across his mind out loud because then Kira will huff at him and she’s already going to be insufferable about this for a long while. Not for the first time, he is glad that she can’t read his mind, and he can only hear what thoughts of hers she chooses to share.

It’s as he’s bending down to put his discarded shirt back on that he hears someone shouting from behind him.

“Need a ride?”

Ben turns.

The speaker is sitting on a long steel boat. Little dark puffs are coming out of the top of a small smokestack, and the deck is covered with all sorts of...well…

Junk seems a kind word for it.

Times are hard though, so people cling to what they can.

“Where are you headed?” he asks her, his voice muffled through his undershirt. He still hasn’t put a shirt on. The speaker is watching him from under goggles to keep the soot in the air out of her eyes. She’s decently tall, with dark hair and that’s about as much as he can make of her. She’s wearing dusty brown clothes that are not the right size for her, and the bottom of her face is covered by a long strip of sweat-stained cloth, rather like his own. 

“Here and there,” she says. “South’s next. Tarrytown. Then Bunta Ridge, probably. Gastown at some point. Where are you headed?”

Kira makes a huffing sort of noise and Ben glances at her.

“Will that thing hold my daemon? She looks ten minutes away from sinking.”

“She’s sturdy,” the woman replies. “We had the head of a tank on here a few weeks back. She kept on just fine.”

“The head of a tank?” Ben asks, surprised. “Wouldn’t that get you into trouble with the First Order?”

The woman shrugs. “They don’t come round here much. We’re too much in nowhere. What are you doing here anyway?” Her eyes flick down to his jacket then back to his face. No hiding it now, he supposes. He definitely looks like a deserter.

_ Satisfying a megalomaniacal curiosity,  _ Kira snorts. Ben elbows her. 

He stares at the woman for a long while. He could very easily pick up his jacket, dust it off, and drag her into the regional office for selling First Order supplies for scrap, which violates regional protocol.

But his jacket is in the dust and he hadn’t died in the river and there’s no blood on his hands.

“What’s your name?” he asks her instead.

“My name?” She sounds surprised at the question and he sees her eyes--he wonders what color they are behind those goggles of hers--narrow slightly, distrustfully.  _ What’s she doing suddenly getting distrustful? She’s the one who offered me a ride on her fucking boat.  _ “Rey,” she says. “I’m Rey.”

“Why are you offering me a ride, Rey?”

“Who are you, First Order?” she snaps at him and he can feel Kira’s eyes on him.

Rey’s daemon appears on her shoulder, a grey furry thing with dark spots at each eye and a long snout. Ben’s never seen one before. Its little paws have developed enough to be able to grip her shoulders like a monkey, but it’s not a monkey. It’s watching him very, very intensely.

“No,” Ben says. “I’m not. But you can’t blame a man for not wanting to trust a stranger in these parts. Can you?”

Rey relaxes. “No,” she says. “Kylo thought I shouldn’t offer you a ride.” A hand drifts to the top of her daemon’s head and she pats him. He looks annoyed at her, and Ben smiles under his mask, sure that she’s getting an earful right now.

“Why are you, then?” he asks her again. He can hear the smile in his own voice. Can she hear it too? 

_ Coming on a bit strong, aren’t you?  _

Kira can, it seems.

“You looked like you were having a bad day,” she says, nodding to the pack. He can see the way her eyes are dropping down over his chest now, down his stomach to his hips, then back up again. He smirks under his mask.

“Better now,” he replies. “Thanks--I’ll take you up on that ride.”

He grabs his shirt and shrugs into it, but leaves the jacket in the dirt, along with the pack. 

He doesn’t need them anymore.

**

Her ship is packed to the bursting point, and bigger than it looks from the outside. 

“Help me move this,” she says of half a car frame that they tilt onto its side so that Kira has a place to stand. Rey’s daemon--Kylo--is chattering at either Kira or Rey, but not at Ben. Never at Ben. Ben runs a hand over Kira’s head, stroking her. 

“I’ll brush you down once we’re on the way,” he promises.

_ You’d better. This seems like a bad idea. You’re having a day full of bad ideas. _

“This is better than the last one.”

_ That’s not fair. Everything’s better than the last one. _

He smiles and rests his head against her neck once more before following Rey into the cabin. 

She has an air purifier in the cabin and strips off her mask and goggles the moment they’ve shut the door behind them. Her eyes are hazel, and her lips are wide and a deep sort of pink. They’re chapped and as she looks at him, she tugs at one of the bits of flaking skin there with her teeth. “You don’t have to wear that,” she nods to him, and he tugs his undershirt off his face. “I also have some better cloth. If you want that layer back.”

“Thanks,” Ben replies. This place is…

Well, he’d call it a mess, except that it has a water purifier too, which she has working on filling two bottles with fresh, distilled water. He licks his lips, staring at them and a moment later, Rey is handing him one of the bottles. He downs the whole thing, and sighs when it’s empty, handing it back to her. 

“You’re being very kind,” he says slowly. “That doesn’t happen much.”

“No,” Rey agrees. “And I’m not usually kind.”

“So why--”

“You tried to drown yourself,” she says bluntly. “Or nearly drowned. No one swims in the river unless they’re trying to get away from something, and you were trying to get away from something. You left your uniform behind, and your pack. You’re trying to make something new for yourself.”

Ben doesn’t say a word. For some reason, every instinct in his body isn’t telling him to fight her, wrestle her to the ground, bind her arms and legs, bring her in for insubordination or just throw her, bound and gagged, into the river. He would have done that once. He should do it now. She’s clearly got no respect for order or authority. 

But Ben doesn’t know that he does either at this point. So he doesn’t. 

More curiously, though, he doesn’t want to either.

“Thanks,” he says.

“What are you trying to get away from?” she asks gently. “All of it? Or something specific?”

He swallows, but doesn’t reply. What could he say to that? There isn’t anything he wants to say to that. He remembers that flash of green, that shout of  _ Ben, no! _ and blood. So much blood.

He looks down at his hands.

There’s oil and grime, but none of it’s rust colored.

“What about you?” he asks her. “How’d you get this ship anyway? You steal it?”

“Nah,” she replies. “I rent it. Unkar Plutt lives over in Gastown. He has scavengers and seekers and peddlers to bring him back what they can scrounge of value. I rent the boat, he pays me for what I bring back.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”

“Well, there’s not much out here, is there?” she retorts, cocking her head. He doesn’t like her lips drawn tight like that. They should smile. They should sing and sigh.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “I didn’t have much of a life either.”

“Does anyone these days?” she asks. It packs a punch and he looks down at his bloodless bloody hands.

“You got family?” he asks, regretting the question immediately because she’ll probably send it right back at him, and  _ then _ what is he supposed to say?

“Nah,” she says. “I--I thought they’d come back for me. Part of me still hopes they will.”

She doesn’t say more, she’s looking at him with a slight jut to her jaw as though daring him to push more, but he can get everything he needs from it.  _ You were left behind. You didn’t want to be. And now you have to do this. _

She’d probably have to do it anyway if they’d stayed, but the alone part hurts.

The alone part always hurts.

“What’s Kylo?” he asks.

“Excuse me?”

“The animal. I’ve never seen--”

“A raccoon,” she says with a smile. “Useful, since he’s got hands. That’s about all he’s good for, except keeping me warm at night. Sleeps right on top of my chest. Must be nice to have one who can bring you around.”

“If Kira lets me ride her, it’s because she’s taking pity on me. She’s not a pack mule.”

And Rey laughs, her lips spreading wide across her face, light seeming to dance in her eyes. Ben stares at her, and stares at her, and he wishes he could still drink the water because his mouth goes dry. 


	2. Chapter 2

They make it to Tarrytown the next morning and Rey moors the boat along a dock whose wood is mostly rotting. The wood groans under Ben’s weight and he hurries across it before it can collapse underneath him. 

_ I am not going to get across _ , Kira tells Ben, giving him a beady gaze.  _ I’m staying here. _

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Are you?”

Because that’ll hurt.

That’ll hurt like a motherfucker. He’s never been one who’s enjoyed testing the bounds of how far he can be from his daemon, and he doesn’t particularly want to start now. He doesn’t think Kira does either. Artoo was able to soar high and far from Uncle Luke, but to hear Uncle Luke tell it, the training to get up that far had been excruciating and they never do it for too long.

“What’s the matter?” Rey asks him.

“Kira’s dubious she can get across without breaking the dock.”

Rey shrugs. “You’re welcome to stay on the boat if you’d prefer,” she tells him. 

“No, I think she’s being a coward,” Ben replies a little more loudly than is necessary for Rey’s ears. A moment later, the horse is crunching her way across the dock as quickly as she can, headbutting him as she passes, her tail flicking one way and then the next in her irritation.

“She doesn’t look pleased,” Rey says.

“She’ll get over it,” Ben replies dryly. He helps Rey unload what she wants to sell from the boat and makes sure his gun is loaded before he helps her bring it to the marketplace. He doesn’t know what Tarrytown is like, but he does know he doesn’t much like getting caught unawares.

In the little market square, she stretches her wares out on the ground in front of her. Kylo carries a money pouch in his little raccoon hands and hands it to Rey before going and perching up in a dead tree to watch the townsfolk who are coming with their daemons to see what Rey has to offer.

Which is when Rey takes a deep breath through her cloth mask, fills her lungs, and begins to shout “Repairs and trade. I’ll fix what’s broken or sell you a new one.”

And Ben watches her do it. He watches as people stop by, handing her blenders or power drills or sewing machines or, in one case, a gun to inspect and see if she can fix. Rabbit and sparrow and housecat and terrier daemons all sniff at the wares while their humans talk with Rey, asking her prices and trying to get her to drop them down. 

“I feel a bit useless,” Ben murmurs to Kira.

_ You’re the muscle,  _ Kira replies.  _ Keeping an eye out for her. I bet she gets a lot of trouble, girl alone in the world like this. _

It’s true, he supposes. He does have a gun in his belt. For all he knows, Rey doesn’t. He hadn’t seen her grab one before they’d left the boat. Staves are good, but not as useful as instant, metal death. 

He runs a hand absentmindedly over Kira. Then he digs through the bag he had helped carry and finds her brush and begins to brush her down. He’d been cursory yesterday and had promised her something better than what she’d gotten. But he’d been tired and Rey had given him something to eat that wasn’t exactly tasty but wasn’t exactly terrible, which was more than he could say of the rations he’d had since leaving headquarters, which had only made him want to get himself to sleep.

Even if he’d dreamed of blood on his hands again.

“Hey!” he hears Rey shout and he whirls around. She’s sprinting off after two men, running as fast as her legs will take her, Kylo clinging to her back. A moment later, they’ve rounded a corner and are gone.

“What happened?” Ben asks.

_ I don’t know,  _ Kira says.

He glances at her, and at Rey’s wares. 

“Stay here,” he says. “Guard the--”

_ Don’t go too far,  _ Kira replies sharply, and he nods, reaching into the bag again and grabbing his gun.

Then he’s off after them, his legs stretching, his stride long. The further and further he gets from Kira, the more strain he feels in his heart, but he pushes through it. He doesn’t know if Rey’s in trouble, and he doesn’t want her to end up hurt--or worse. 

Rey has caught one of the men and has--at some point--located a pole that she’s using to try and knock him down. She’s fighting like a hellcat and Ben’s finger twitches on the trigger in case he needs it.

It happens fast--the way the second man grabs Kylo’s tail and tugs the raccoon off her back. He watches her go stiff, watches as Kylo hisses and snarls and swipes at the man as Rey stumbles back, panting. Kylo comes loose from her back, his tail still in the other man’s hand and, with a twist, bites the hand--hard. 

Rey’s stumbling back, but she’s also swinging the pipe wildly and it knocks her first assailant, who is clearly surprised at what’s going on. He is winded and she pounces, ripping what Ben sees is the money pouch out of his hand. 

“Kylo!” she yells. Kylo has been biting and scratching at the man who’d grabbed him but abandons his own attack the moment he hears Rey’s cry. He scampers across the ground towards Rey who pulls him up into her arms and sprints past Ben back towards the stand. 

Ben doesn’t follow her. He stares at the two men, both looking winded and worse for wear. His heart is hammering in his chest, his innards are twisting, trying to pull him back towards Kira, he doesn’t need to be this far from her, he shouldn’t be this far from his daemon. But he waits. 

The men notice him at last, and maybe it’s his face that makes their expressions shift. Tired and defeated turns to fear. One of them presses a hand to his pocket, where Ben sees a gerbil poking her head out to see what’s going on.

Then they turn and run from him.

But his legs are long and strong like a horse’s. They wouldn’t be able to outrun him. Not that they need to. Not that they’ll get far at all.

He aims and fires--two quick shots right into their backs. They crumple to the ground, lifeless. Or maybe still alive but only paralyzed. He doesn’t care.

No blood on his hands, but two more lives to tally to an endless list.

He turns and walks slowly back to Rey’s stand, where she is feverishly packing all her wares.

_ Where were you?  _ Kira huffs at him. He rests a hand on her neck. It’s still as stone. Calm, even while his heart--well--

His heart beats normally again, now that he’s close to her.

Death doesn’t phase him. He stopped caring who he killed long ago. 

Life is worthless, but Rey has been kind to him and no one touches Kylo like that. 

The villagers of Tarrytown will have heard the gunshots. They will have called a sheriff, but it doesn’t matter. Between Rey and Kylo and Kira, they are able to bring everything to the boat quickly. They load Kira on first, then climb on themselves and cut themselves a drift. Kylo is tucked into the front of Rey’s shirt, his head poking out of her neckline. She keeps running a hand over the top of it, pressing a kiss to his fur, as though assuring herself that he’s--that they’re safe.

“You all right?” Ben asks as Tarrytown fades along the horizon. 

Rey glances at him, then nods. 

“Yeah,” she says. Then she turns and goes into the cabin and that night, when they curl up asleep, Kylo is still folded in her arms.

**

They spend most of the next two days in the boat’s cabin. Kylo stays tucked into Rey’s shirt for the first, but by the time the sun has set on the next and Ben and Rey are hydrating their rations, he ventures outside to keep Kira company. 

Ben doesn’t ask Rey if she’s all right again. She’d said she was and either she was lying and didn’t want to be infantilized, or she was, actually, fine and it was Kylo who was distressed.

But on the third day, Rey rises from the bed, gently evicts Kylo from her shirt, and prepares what wares she has for disembarking at Bunta Ridge.

It’s the same setup as Tarrytown, Rey setting her wares up on a little blanket and hollering her services to the skies until people stopped by with what they had for trade. 

This time, Ben doesn’t let himself get distracted from anyone who approaches the setup. Kylo is up a tree again, But if Ben has his way, he won’t come down at all until Rey says it’s time to go.

“What have we here?”

There are three of them, all in dark coats, and Rey goes still looking at them. 

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a little violator, don’t we. You know this is an illegal setup, right? No wareselling without a permit. You got a permit, sweetheart?”

Rey doesn’t reply.

The man at the front of the group tilts his head and beneath his mask, Ben is sure he’s smirking. “Well, it’s off to jail with you, little lady. If you’re lucky and it’s not a labor camp.” He’s tall and his coat runs a little short.

_ A little short. _

“Soldier,” Ben barks and all three of them stiffen and look around. “I’d like to see your ID.”

“ID?” asks the man in question. “Who are you to demand to--”

“First Order Regulation 49-8310-B states that all citizens are allowed to see proof of identification. Or have you forgotten your basic training?”

The man frowns at Ben. 

“How would you know that, scum?”

“How do you not? Unless you didn’t come by that uniform through standard issue. Looks like it doesn’t quite...fit.”

And there are three blasters pointing at him and Rey saying, “Ben,” in a hushed, low voice. 

“You even know how to fire those things?” Ben leers at them, suddenly reckless. “I’d guess you don’t. They’re not standard issue either, I’d point out.”

“How would you know, deserter?” snarls one of the men.

“The last thing you want to do is shoot me,” he says. “Because no one but us knows that you’re not First Order. So they’ll report you right in. Who do you think you stand a better chance dealing with? Me, letting you get off easy to whatever petty crime you’re trying to bully your way into doing? Or Captain Phasma?”

The guns lower. The men glance at one another. He catches sight of one of their daemons, a lizard, flicking her tongue into her man’s ear. 

Then they are gone.

Rey sags with relief. “Thank you,” she says, looking up at him with the most beautiful sincerity on her face. “Thank you. Was that...was that a real order? 49-83-whatever?”

Ben snorts. “No. But they weren’t going to know that. They weren’t First Order.”

Rey turns and stares after them in the direction they’d gone off in. “They’ll keep causing trouble,” she says sadly. “But I don’t know how to stop them.”

Ben does, but they’re gone already and his hands are still clean. This was the best he could have gotten them to without bloodshed. He breathes slowly, then looks down at Rey again. 

“Stick around or pack up?” he asks her.

She looks down at her wares, then around the little marketplace. No one is coming near them now. The damage is done. She sighs. 

“Let’s go.”


	3. Chapter 3

It’s two days down the river to Gastown.

Gastown is even more desolate than Tarrytown. The buildings are less buildings and more shacks with tarps for roofs. Everyone looks tired, everyone looks hungry, and as Ben walks alongside Rey, Kira trotting along at their sides and Kylo, once again, in Rey’s shirt, he feels like they are watching him. 

_ They could eat me,  _ he thinks. Cannibalism is forbidden by the First Order, but he also knows that it has happened. It’s what happens when crops die and there’s no livestock or game and hunger makes men’s eyes turn to one another. Are the people here so hungry? Or is it that he thinks he deserves to die, to feed their bodies for what he’s been a part of, for what he’s wrought on the world? 

“Do they look dangerous to you?” he asks Kira out of the side of his mouth so that--he hopes--Rey won’t hear.

_ Nothing we couldn’t fight off. Are you worried?  _ Kira doesn’t sound worried.

“No,” he says. He’s quite confident he could thoroughly destroy anyone in this town. None of them look substantial enough to withstand an elbowing, much less a grounded punch.

_ Guilty? _

He gives Kira a dirty look and her ears flick knowingly. 

Yes. Guilty. Always guilty. What will he ever be able to do to wash away the guilt? Those hungry eyes send goosebumps across his entire body and all he can think is that he wants to run as far away from all this as he can.  _ They starve for what we did,  _ he thinks.  _ Coward.  _ Coward for wanting to run, coward for being unable to face their pain. Coward for not being able to do anything about it.

They stop in front of the only building that is, in fact, a building with a roof made of folded tin. The man sitting in front of it is likely the only person around for miles who looks like he’s eating well enough. More than enough. His grease-stained shirt only barely covers the rolls of fat on his belly and a great mud-covered hog of a daemon sits at his side.

Ben knows without having to be introduced who the man must be.

“Who’s this?” Unkar Plutt asks, nodding to Ben.

“A friend,” Rey says, and she tosses her coin purse to him. 

Plutt hefts the purse, but doesn’t open it. “Better be no rocks in this one,” he tells her.

“All credits,” Rey says. Plutt’s eyes, dark and beady, are still leveled at Ben. Ben stares back at him. He’s not afraid of Unkar Plutt. He’s met men far more terrifying than Unkar Plutt.

He is more terrifying than Unkar Plutt.

“Your friend doesn’t pay rent on my boat,” Plutt points out. “He has no right to be there. You are also,” he hefts the purse again, “Short several credits for portions. So forgive me if I don’t give you anything at all this time around.”

He doesn’t look at her when he says it. He keeps staring at Ben, as though daring him to fight. 

“Who is he, anyway?” Plutt asks. “What’s his story?”

Rey casts a sideways glance at Ben. The silence she gives Plutt comes from her own ignorance. She has never pressed him on it, so Ben looks at Plutt and gives him as hard a look as he can manage.  _ Don’t fuck with me. _

_ Don’t fuck with her. _

Plutt makes an annoyed grunt. “He’s trouble. You’re better off without him.” That much, Ben thinks, might be true. But he’s not exactly going to say that. “Be careful of who you ally yourself with. You don’t want to make an enemy of me. Or else you’ll lose that boat and everything else and then what will happen to you?”

Rey nods, her jaw jutting out angrily, and turns away from Plutt. She begins walking, straight-backed, towards the boat. 

For a moment, Ben’s hand itches towards his gun. Quick and easy. He could do it. What is the law out here, except what you make it? What is the life of a greedy weasel of a man worth? How many credits? How much pain and suffering?

_ Come on,  _ Kira huffs at him.  _ If you were going to kill him you’d have already done it. _

So he turns and follows Rey back to the edge of the river. 

“It’ll be alright,” she tells him when he catches up and they’re long out of earshot of Unkar Plutt. “It’s not the first time he hasn’t given us rations. We’ll fish something out of the river.”

“Things live in the river?” Ben asks and Rey doesn’t answer.  _ Optimism,  _ he says looking down at her out of the corner of his eye.  _ Such optimism. Even though she knows it won’t happen. _

Because it doesn’t. They bait fishing lines with dead bugs and set them on the back of the boat and let the boat drift downstream rather than turning on the motors. Nothing’s going to bite. Ben knows this. Rey knows it too. But they sit all the same.

“You haven’t asked about me,” he observed. “You couldn’t tell Plutt about me because you’ve never asked.”

“No,” she agrees. “Everyone out here’s got their own pain. I figure you’d tell me what you wanted when you wanted.”

“What if I’m a murderer?” he asks her, thinking of the two men in Tarrytown. She, like everyone else, will have heard the gunshots. 

“Then kill me,” she replies, and he can tell from her voice that she doesn’t expect him to kill her at all. Somewhere behind the thick grey pollution, the sun is setting, sending shots of infected red and poisonous purple across the sky. “I promise I won’t be angry. Life’s hard out here and I’ve done my best to survive, but I know it’s futile. Everyone dies.”

Ben takes a deep breath behind the mask she’d given him. She’d been willing to help keep him alive with no questions asked. Surely she couldn’t mean it that she’d be willing to die. There’s a steel edge to her, a fighter’s intensity that came not from fighting other people but from fighting the world, wanting to keep herself alive at all costs. Surely she wouldn’t just let someone take that away from her.

“What if I’m a rapist?” he asks her instead.

She snorts. “You’ve had me alone more times than once in the past few days. What’s kept you, then?”

He swallows and looks back out over the water. There are cruelties he’s considered before, crimes he’s done, but that’s never been one of them. 

“I wanted to murder Unkar Plutt,” he tells her.

“You and me both,” she grunts.

“I did murder those two men in Tarrytown.”

She looks at him before nodding. “I was wondering.”

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“I’m glad of that,” she says softly. 

Her fingers brush against his and a shock runs up his entire arm and his head snaps to look at hers. 

“Sorry,” she says at once. “I wasn’t expecting static.”

“No,” he agrees. “Me neither.”

There’s a lot of things he hasn’t expected about Rey.

“You don’t care that I killed them?” he asks.

“What makes you think I didn’t want to kill them too?” she asks.

“That I’ve killed others?”

“How do you know I haven’t killed?”

His eyes search hers underneath her goggles. “You haven’t,” he tells her. “You haven’t killed anyone.”

“No, but I fought someone until there was blood pouring out of their mouth,” she tells him defiantly. “I’ve broken someone’s ribs, I’ve shot someone in a place that may not kill them, but I know they didn’t have the medicine to treat it. If they didn’t die quick, the infection would get them slow. It’s a dark world these days. Take what light you can, but anyone who begrudges you the dark hasn’t looked at themselves in a mirror.”

“And if I made the world dark?” he asks quietly. “I was First Order.”

She doesn’t look away. He’ll give her credit for that much at least. 

“I know that,” she tells him again, but her breath is a bit shaky in her reply. “I saw your jacket, remember?”

“I wasn’t just a law enforcement grunt,” he tells her, thinking of the imposters at Bunta Ridge. “I was at Snoke’s side. I watched it all happen and didn’t do a thing to stop it, even if there was a part of me that knew it was wrong. I didn’t care. Better to let the world hurt the way I was hurting than to feel alone for one second longer.”

“Why did you feel alone?” she asks him, and there it is, even if she doesn’t know what she’s asking. She’s asking it. 

His throat closes and he thinks of the father he killed, the mother he loves but can’t talk to, won’t talk to, because if he does he’ll break into a thousand pieces, thinks of the uncle who tried to murder him.

“Family,” he mutters. “I was never good enough for them.” 

Rey takes his hand and squeezes it and in her touch he knows that she knows the feeling all too well. 

“I never know if I turned my back on them, or if they turned their backs on me,” he says, thinking of his father.  _ I want to see the face of my son. _

_ Who even is your son anymore, dad? I’m not the little kid I was dressing up to be like you and wanting to see the stars. But I know that this is wrong, why can’t I turn away from it? _

He’d jumped into a river to drown himself rather than try.

He swallows.

“I wasn’t good enough for mine, either,” she tells him quietly. “I try not to think about it, but I wonder if that means I’m not good enough for anyone.”

She looks away from him, up at the purpling clouds. “I miss when there were stars. There used to be stars.”

Ben swallows.  _ You are good enough,  _ he wants to tell her.  _ You’re too good, really.  _

_ You make me feel like someone has faith in me and I’ve never had that before. _

_ You make me want to survive all this. To try and make it better, fix what I did wrong, even if that’s impossible. _

“You’re not alone,” is what he tells her instead.

She looks back at him and in the darkness, her eyes are shining behind her goggles. “Neither are you,” she tells him.

There are no fish biting but maybe they will overnight.  _ A watched pot never boils,  _ his mother used to say when he was small and staring at the dinner he was helping Threepio make (even if he was too small to really help).  _ A watched fish never catches _ doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Rey’s hand is still in his.

His is still in hers. 

So he lifts it and presses it to his lips through the cloth of his mask. It’s warm and calloused and small and he hears her breath catch when he does it.

There aren’t stars overhead. There’s no moon. There’s just the rippling of the oil-slicked water against the boat. But Rey stands when he does and follows him into the cabin of her boat. She strips off her mask and goggles, strips off her shirt and pants. He strips off his.

And when their lips connect, he feels truly alive for the first time in years.


	4. Chapter 4

It takes a week before Ben notices.

Everyone coughs in the smog. Hard to avoid, even wearing masks to keep as much of the airborne pollution out of one’s lungs. 

Rey coughs, Ben coughs, Kylo coughs, Kira coughs. Their sneezes produce snot with mites of black soot. That’s just the way of the world now.

So it takes him a week to notice that Rey’s coughs have gotten far more hacking, that she’s wheezing a little bit when they curl around one another in her cabin, her head resting on his chest, tucked under his chin in a way he never thought would ever happen.

It’s right before she coughs so hard she vomits, ripping her mask off and throwing up into the polluted river that he starts to think back on it.

Maybe it was something in the water; maybe it was something in the air; but all Ben knows is she’s sick and he doesn’t know what to do.

“You got any medicine?” he asks her, leading her to her bed and tucking her under her blankets. She’s a bit pallid beneath her tan, and there’s sweat on her brow. 

She shakes her head. “Too expensive,” she says. “I’ve always been healthy.”

“Well you’re not now,” he says.

In the next town, Ben mans the stand alone. He doesn’t offer repair services. He doesn’t know how to fix things--only break them. And when he has enough credits, he goes and buys food and does his best to find something that’ll drop the fever that is spreading across Rey’s forehead every time he presses his hand there. Her lips are starting to chap and she keeps on wheezing and every time she does, his anxiety spikes.

_ You shouldn’t care this much,  _ he tells himself whenever her eyelids flutter shut and sleep overtakes her.  _ You’re a monster, remember? _

But he doesn’t feel like a monster with Rey.

He doesn’t know what he is.

It’s not tamed, he doesn’t feel domesticated. But it’s like the rioting voices in his head, the ones that had led him to the river to begin with, have all gone silent. It’s like they’re watching him, waiting to see if they need to begin again, or if they’ve lost their grip and must find someone else to torment. (Ben wonders if Snoke sleeps at night without voices in his head; he wonders if Snoke thinks he sees blood on his hands.)

The medicine is too expensive so he decides food is more important. Darkly he wishes he  _ had _ killed Unkar Plutt the way he’d wanted to and that he’d raided the man’s ration storage. Then he and Rey could do whatever they wanted, could be free, could buy medicine when Rey needs it even though it’s expensive. He wishes he’d never thrown himself into the river to begin with, so that he’d never lost his good mask which he could have given to her, so that his first aid kit had never been stolen.

But if the river hadn’t spat him back out, then Rey wouldn’t have let him aboard her boat, would she? Then she wouldn’t have anyone to take care of her.

Maybe it’s because the voices have gone away, or because he only catches glimpses of blood on his hands  _ sometimes  _ that he takes a deep breath and looks at Kira.

“She’s going to die, isn’t she?” he asks her.

Kira’s tail flicks. 

_ Kylo won’t talk about it.  _ But he hears exactly what he expects to in her voice.

He rests his forehead against her neck, his heart beating in his throat. 

“Is Kylo feeling ok?”

_ He’s wheezing too. _

“Any ideas?” he asks Kira desperately. He hasn’t asked her what she thinks of Kylo, though he has seen the racoon curled up on her back when they’re both asleep. He hasn’t known that it’s mattered. It wouldn’t have stopped his holding Rey, kissing her, tucking loose strands of her hair away when he gets the chance. It wouldn’t change his fear that she’ll die. 

_ Just the one,  _ Kira says significantly. 

“No,” Ben says automatically.

_ It’s what I’ve got and you asked,  _ Kira retorts hotly.

“Think harder.”

_ Why won’t you consider it? _

“Because he’ll say no just to spite me,” he says rounding on on Kira. “He tried to kill me, and he’ll do it again. Especially after--”  _ Especially after I helped destroy the world, helped destroy everything he tried to build, killed my father, so much blood on my damn hands. _

_ And it’s been a few years. He’d think before he shoots. He’d let you talk--let you explain,  _ Kira tells him.

“No,” Ben snaps.

_ And you’re the one who thinks your survival meant something serious, meant that you were being given a chance to undo what you’d done,  _ Kira continues as though Ben had said nothing at all.  _ That means facing your demons, not running from them and even if you didn’t kill Luke, he’s one of your demons. _

Ben glares at the horse. The horse glares right back.

“How will we find him?” If he could have found Luke, he would have. He would have years ago, and cut the heart right out of his body and thrown it into the dirt.

Kira doesn’t reply right away.  _ I know where he is,  _ she says at last.

Ben blinks at her, then feels his expression darken. “You what?”

_ I know where he is,  _ she replies evenly. 

“And you didn’t tell me?” he snarls. It’s like she’d kicked him--which she has done at least once by accident and at least twice on purpose. It’s not a pleasant feeling--indeed it’s one of the more painful things he’s ever felt.

_ You never asked,  _ Kira replies firmly.  _ Which means I don’t think you really wanted to find him. I don’t think you  _ wanted _ to kill him. _

“I did!” Ben bellows, feeling his voice shred a little bit. “He tried to kill me!”

_ And killing him wouldn’t take that pain away. You know that. You know that death doesn’t take pain away--it just makes more. _

He hates her in that moment, but that’s nothing new. He’s always sort of hated himself.

_ You wanted justice, you wanted recompense, you wanted acknowledgement. Death wouldn’t give you that. But you don’t know what will.  _ This _ will. Saving Rey will.  _

“You’re out of your mind,” he hisses at the horse.

_ It’ll certainly show him he was wrong.  _

“How’s that?” Ben snarls.

_ Because you want to save as much as you’ve destroyed. You always have. You just haven’t known how. _

Ben turns away, his head reeling, his heart racing. “You’re wise about this, all of a sudden.”

_ You weren’t ready to hear it,  _ Kira tells him.  _ I love you, Ben, but you’re stubborn as a mule sometimes and you were hurting too much to hear it. _

“And you weren’t?”

_ I was,  _ she says.  _ But Artoo didn’t try to kill me. So something about it wasn’t right, it wasn’t balanced it wasn’t… _

“Planned,” Ben says, bitterness dripping from his lips. Nothing with Ben ever goes to plan. Ben’s  _ existence _ wasn’t planned at all--the accident his parents hadn’t thought to try and protect against. Had his father regretted that accident when Ben had shot him in the chest?

_ I know where he is,  _ Kira continues quietly, shifting behind him to nudge her masked nose against his shoulder, a shadow of comfort.  _ I know where Artoo is, which means he’s not far. _

Inside the boat’s cabin, he hears Rey cough.

He’d thrown himself into the river out of desperation, hadn’t he? Or was it megalomania as Kira had accused him? Was it megalomania to think that this was more important than keeping Rey alive? He’d kept himself alive, after all. He could do it again. 

He swallows.

“Fine,” he says. “Take us there, then.”

**

They make their way back to the boat and Ben begins to fill every bottle and thermos and container he can find with water, loading them into packs. It’ll be heavy, but he’s strong. 

“Where are you going?” rasps Rey.

He crosses the cabin and crouches down next to her, stroking her forehead. “You’re coming with me,” he tells her. “I’m not leaving you behind.”

She just wheezes at him and her eyelids flutter shut and does he imagine the relief he sees there? “I’ll keep you safe,” he whispers. “But I’m not going to sit here and watch you die.”

He doesn’t care what happens to the boat. Priorities are priorities. Rey’s livelihood only matters if she lives, and if she lives at the end of all this, then she can maybe be free of Unkar Plutt. Let Plutt always wonder what happened to her. Let him think she abandoned him, stole his boat, stole everything he’d given her. Let him think that Ben killed her. He doesn’t care.

He loads what food he can into the pack as well before going back on deck to talk to Kira.

“I can wrap a blanket around you,” he says carefully. Kira tosses her head.

_ I don’t think I can carry you both. _

“Just Rey,” he says. His stomach squirms. He doesn’t want to force Kira into this, doesn’t want to say the dark thoughts in his mind  _ this was your idea after all, you have to help. Give me your body. _

Kira looks at him with her steady amber eyes. Then she nuzzles him through her mask.  _ Just Rey,  _ she agrees.  _ And yes--a blanket please. I like her, and I like that you like her, but a blanket please. _

“As many as you want,” he says. He moves in and out of the cabin finding blankets to strap over the top of his beautiful, brave mare. 

He glances at Kylo as he does it. It’s rude to address another’s daemon, but Rey’s dying and still in the cabin and Kylo looks like he can’t quite hold himself up. “You’ll be ok too,” he tells the raccoon, who lifts his eyes to Ben in surprise.

The daemon doesn’t reply but Ben hadn’t expected him to. He goes back into the cabin one last time and eases Rey off the bedding. She’s hot and shaking and sweaty in his arms. He presses his lips to her forehead as he wraps her mask and goggles around her face again. 

“I’m glad the water didn’t take you,” Rey whispers to him. “I didn’t want to die alone.”

“You’re not going to die,” he replies fiercely. “And you wouldn’t be alone--you’d have Kylo.”

“Yes but he’s scared too and I wouldn’t know how to comfort him,” Rey says and he sees tears leak from her eyes and get caught against the rubber sealant of the goggles. He holds her close to his heart.

“Come on,” he says. “Come with me,” and he leads her out onto the deck, down the plywood plank they use for docking and over to Kira. 

“I can’t,” Rey says, looking between him and the horse.

“You can,” he tells her. “Rey, you can’t walk and we’ve got a long road ahead of us. You have to.”

“But--” her voice falters as she looks at the horse. Gently, Kira extends her head out towards Rey.

_ Put her hand on my head,  _ Kira says.

Ben doesn’t ask  _ are you sure _ . He just raises Rey’s hand and rests it there on her forehead, right between her ears.

It’s not the same spark as it was when she’d brushed her fingers along his--it’s something else entirely. A swoop in his stomach, a clarity in his sight. And all too soon, it’s over, Rey’s hand retreating quickly, as though she’s afraid she’s gone too far. She looks up at Ben, shyer now than she had been when she’d stripped off her clothes for the first time. 

Then she bends down to scoop Kylo up, to tuck him into the breast of her shirt, right by her heart before letting Ben help her up onto Kira’s back. 

Ben straps the pack filled with clean water across his shoulders.

And then they walk.


	5. Chapter 5

It takes them four days to reach Luke.

Four days where Rey can’t keep what little food they have in her stomach, where she coughs so hard that her mask becomes stained with dried blood. She can drink, though, so that’s something.

She passes out more than once on Kira’s back and Ben has to catch her and adjust her, putting her stomach down across his daemon’s back and--apologizing profusely to the unconscious Kylo--positions him similarly, doing his best to tuck him into the blankets since he is so much smaller than Rey.

Her fever doesn’t abate, and by the time he can see Artoo flying overhead above them, she’s mumbling things in delirium. “Ben,” she moans. “Come back.”

“I’m here, sweetheart,” he tells her desperately. He has known some fear in his life, but nothing--nothing is quite like the fear that she will die when they are so close.

Artoo keeps circling overhead, bright golden wings in the dusty sky. He doesn’t go to the cabin in the distance to tell Luke, and he doesn’t land. He just watches them approach and Ben is too tired to feel dubious about it all.

He sees Luke on the porch and his sweat turns cold. They are nearly out of water by now, and his feet are tired and blistered but that doesn’t stop him from wanting to run the other way out into the wastes because that hell is safer, somehow, than the way he feels looking at his uncle.

And then Artoo swoops in front of him, turning quickly before going to settle on Luke’s shoulder, long talons digging in lightly. 

“Ben,” his uncle says.

“Luke,” he replies. He feels like a boy again.

“Who’s this?” Luke’s eyes are still the same clear blue, but his beard is dusted with gray now. Oddly, he is not wearing a mask. Why isn’t he wearing a mask?

Luke’s eyes are on Kira’s back, where Rey is lying face down.

“This is Rey,” he says. “She’s a scavenger from the river. She doesn’t deserve to die.”

Luke raises his eyebrows. “Does anyone deserve to die?”

“You thought I did,” Ben says before he could stop himself.

_ Ben,  _ Kira groans.

Luke doesn’t say a word. He just stares at his nephew and everything feels wrong. It always has with Luke. His uncle is supposed to be a hero, supposed to be protective, supposed to care about him, love him, and yet--

“You killed Han,” he says. 

“I did,” Ben says. “I’ve killed so many people I’ve lost count. I’ve tried to kill myself, too. Didn’t work.”

Luke raises his eyebrows. Then he sighs.

“We have that in common, I suppose. Bring her in, Ben. She doesn’t deserve to die because of what we are to one another.”

“And what are we?” Ben asks. 

“I don’t know anymore,” Luke says, turning towards the door. “Bring her inside.”

Ben settles Rey--at Luke’s instructions--onto the bed at the back of the cabin. A moment later, Artoo flaps by and rests Kylo down in the crook of Rey’s arms. 

“She won’t keep food down,” he tells his uncle. “And she’s coughing blood.”

His uncle goes to a cabinet and rifles through it for a long moment. Then he comes back with a paper packet of sugar, a vial of amber liquid, and an injector. He opens Rey’s mouth, pours some of the sugar under her tongue, then fills the shot with the amber liquid before sticking it into her arm.

“We’ll see how she takes that,” he tells Ben before giving him a beady look. “Why her?”

“What?”

“Why her? Why do you want to save her? How many miserable souls are out there suffering because of what you’ve helped to do? And yet you pick her?”

Ben looks at his uncle, and death is more on his mind than it had been when he’d thrown himself into the river. “I tried to drown myself,” he says. “Whatever you may think of me, there’s only so much I can take, so much of a monster I can let myself be.”

Luke crosses his arms over his chest, a crease deepening between his brow, and Ben continues.

“The current was too strong and I washed ashore, and she found me there and let me on her boat. No questions, no judgement, no anything.”

“She didn’t save your life,” Luke says. “And you want to save hers.”

“Let me finish, will you?” Ben snaps at his uncle, whose eys flash with something that Ben hasn’t seen there before.

He pauses, waiting for Luke to respond. When he doesn’t, he goes on. “She believed in something in me when no one had for a long time--not even myself. I believe in myself when I’m around her. That I can--” He thinks of Unkar Plutt, of the two men he’d shot, of all the blood he’d shed. He thinks of the townsfolk he’d helped Rey sell her wares to as well, of protecting them from bandits posed as First Order. All of it hits him like Kira kicking him in the chest. And when he speaks again, his voice is thicker than he wants it to be. He doesn’t want this to be over. He doesn’t want her to die. “That I can help, rather than hurt. That I can make it better. That I can’t undo what I’ve done, but I can try to do better than that.”

Luke watches him, and his eyes are so steady that it makes anger flicker in Ben’s breast.

“I don’t need your forgiveness,” he snaps. “I hadn’t done anything wrong-- _ anything _ \--when you tried to--”

“No, you don’t,” Luke says quietly. “But I need yours.”

Ben blinks at him.

“You were barely more than a boy, Ben. Whatever darkness was in you--whatever failures and sins--they weren’t wholly your own. If they’d grown there, it was because we failed you. I failed you. I’m sorry.”

Ben stares at his uncle, just gapes at him open-mouthed. 

“I turned you into a monster in my mind, rather than face what hand I had in creating that,” he said. “Even when you showed up--it was easier to think you were here to kill me than it was to think you might be here to save her.”

He takes a slow breath and behind him, at that precise moment, Rey starts to cough, so much so that she tosses and turns on the bed. Ben’s at her side as though he, and not Artoo, had wings, running his hand over her back as she hacks. More blood. 

“It’s all right,” he tells her. “It’s all right. We have medicine now. You’re going to be ok.”

She’s shaking and crying and her eyes are almost yellow from the fever. 

“Let’s try this,” Luke says quietly and a moment later he’s pressing a mask over Rey’s mouth--a ventilator. He plugs it into the wall and it starts pumping oxygen into her, clear and cannistered.  _ Kerrrrpahhhh. Kerrrrrpahhhh. _

“It was my father’s,” Luke says idly. “He had trouble breathing too.” He gives Ben another sad look.

“Why weren’t you wearing a mask outside?” Ben asks. He can’t see one anywhere, and the cabin is small enough that he would.

“Stopped a while back,” Luke said. “When one vascilates between bitterness and guilt, one does strange things. You wanted to let the water have you, I wanted to let the air have me.”

Ben stares at his uncle and his uncle stares back and suddenly his head hurts. He’s tired, he’s worn, he’s worried and he feels as though he’s absorbed too much rotten to know what’s good anymore, too many lies to know what’s the truth.

“So we fix it together?” he asks quietly. 

Luke holds out a hand.

Ben shakes it.

Then he sits down on the bed next to Rey and watches her breathe.

**

It takes Rey two weeks to recover something remotely close to fully. But she’s off the ventilator after two days and can keep food down after three. Luke keeps injecting her with medicines that Ben doesn’t know, and after the first week, she reaches for Ben and pulls him into the bed to sleep alongside her. They don’t do anything more than that--his uncle is in the room, sleeping on a pallet on the floor. But how good it feels to hold her in his arms again, to hear her increasingly steady breathing.

Luke goes out to the market every other day. His food rations stretch much less far now that he’s got three people in his tiny home. The space helps. Ben and Luke haven’t talked about what  _ fixing it together _ means. Ben doesn’t want to think about anything but Rey.

“Luke’s my uncle,” he tells her. He has a sponge in his hand and a bowl of not-distilled-but-clean-enough-for-bathing water and he’s cleaning some of the sicksweat off her. “He tried to kill me. That sent me to Snoke. I helped break the world, Rey. I did.”

A confession. No apology. No pivoting from what he’s done. No trying to sweeten it, to make it tolerable. No  _ I was just doing as I was told _ , no  _ I was kinder than the rest _ . He tells her of murders, tells her of policies that led to famine, led to orphancy, led to the sky disappearing behind clouds of smog and the water getting slick with purple and gold oil.

He tells her of his father, tells her how his mother still held out hope for him, tells her everything and she sits there quietly and listens. He tells her why he tried to drown himself, and tells her about wanting to but not shooting Unkar Plutt. To her, he confesses all his darkness so that she can know, she can choose, or reject, but that it won’t be a lie he’s living.

When he’s done, he towels her dry, and helps her dress again. Her breathing is still weak, her arms shaky. And when she tucks herself under the blankets again and looks up at him, she looks as though she is thinking hard and thinking carefully. 

“What do you want to be?” she asks him.

He thinks of his uncle.  _ I failed you.  _

“Better than I have been,” he tells her.

“I think you already are,” she tells him and gives him a faint smile. “You’ve helped me, after all. And I think this is just the beginning.”

Air leaves his lungs at her words. He leans himself forward, pressing his forehead against her chest like he’s a child again. She runs her fingers through his hair. 

“You lived,” she tells him. “And so did I. Let’s do something with that. This is a beginning, not an ending.”

And so it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi [here I am](https://linktr.ee/crossingwinter)!


End file.
